Work starts on European Petascale Supercomputer Service

January 2, 2008 by

The project to create a persistent European supercomputing infrastructure starts work this week. The project, known as PRACE (originally an acronym of Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), is a partnership of five Principal partners (UK, Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands) and nine General partners. The project has funding from the EU and from the partners themselves to undertake the ‘preparatory phase’ of the project – to establish the environment for the pan-European supercomputing service though establishement of legal frameworks, technology evaluations, procurement processes, operational plans, petascaling investigations, application requirements capture, etc.

The next stage will be to deploy one or more Petascale supercomputers at one (or more) of the Principal partners, followed by one or more multi-Petascale supercomputers at other Principal partners two years later, and so on.

The project is also planned to have a significant element of technology co-development, building on the considerable European supercomputing research base.

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